Lead Up to and Night of the Tiananmen Square Massacre

Was the Chinese government justified in the Tiananmen Square Massacre?

On the fourth of June 1989, thousands of students died in a massacre that has come to be known as the June Fourth Incident in China. It was a horrifying occurrence built up after five weeks of protesting, demonstrating and speaking out against the Chinese government and its regime, carried out mainly by university students, but also ordinary workers and older intellectuals. The core of the protesting was done in Tiananmen Square, Beijing: the nation’s symbolic and geographical central space. It has long been a gathering place for protestors in China. The protests did not take long to spread around the country. At least four hundred cities protested, reflecting the broad dissatisfaction of China’s working population with the social results of the reform decade. Ten years previous to the Tiananmen Square protests, Mao Zedong died and the period of Maoism ended. Mao was the leader of China, who, according to Deng Xiaoping, was “seven parts right and three parts wrong”. Mao introduced several policies that sent China’s economy down the drain, and Deng Xiaoping was the man who finally replaced him. He became the Paramount Leader (a term used to describe the political leader of China) of China and the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. Deng was the most powerful man in the country. He put in place several reforms that helped heal China’s economy after the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, a decade long period of political and social persecution. But his economic reforms led to extremely high inflation levels and government corruption. There were still restrictions on public expression and citizens remained without voices in parliament. To the general populace, it appeared that rich were just getting richer and the powerful were only becoming more and more powerful. The protests began with the death a man named Hu Yaobang. Hu became something of a martyr to the protesters of 1989. Born into a peasant family in 1915, Hu became a member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1933, when he was just eighteen, eventually becoming the General secretary of the communist party in 1981. Hu was a reformist; he encouraged political reform more than any other leader of his generation. Many Chinese citizens viewed him as incorruptible. After assisting student protests demanding democratic styled freedoms in 1987, Hu was forced to resign for “mistakes on major issues of political policy”. A man of the name Zhao Ziyang replaced him. Hu, however, still remained on the Politburo, the policy making-committee of the communist party until he died on the 15th of April 1989. Hu’s death sent the students of Beijing in an uproar. Students marched to mourn his passing and the marches quickly became less about Hu, and more about speaking out against the government. As one student put it, “We want democracy. Hu Yaobang's death is not the reason for this demonstration. It is the excuse.” In the days after his death, Beijing University students put up posters praising and mourning Hu, and indirectly criticizing the government. The first major demonstration was on the seventeenth of April, as thousands of Beijing students marched to Tiananmen Square crying chants of protest such as “Long live Hu Yaobang! Long live democracy!” The crowd was large, at one point reaching over four thousand people. Most of the students remained in the Square overnight, and the next day held a sit-in at the entrance to the Great Hall of people. More protesters join the students. They had several demands; repudiation of past official campaigns against liberalism, press freedom, more money for education, abolition of regulations against demonstrations, they wanted leaders to reveal their incomes and wanted a complete reassessment of Hu and the validity of his beliefs of democracy and freedom. The government ignored the students’ demands. Similar protests were also held in Shanghai, with groups of up to...

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...During the time prior to the infamous June 4 Massacre in TiananmenSquare China, there were numerous events in which provoked political tension and ultimately stimulated the massacre itself. These events date back to Hu Yaobang’s death followed by the AFS’ seven requests, Deng Xiaoping’s editorial, the student hunger strike, Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to China and the imposed martial law causing the tragic massacre. The Chinese Government, citizens, students, PLA and even some foreign journalists were impacted by these primary incidents to a great extent.
April 15 1989, is the date of Hu Yaobang’s death and historically the day which changed the lives of thousands of Chinese people forever. Hu Yaobang was a progressive man of moderate ideals who was pushing towards the freedom of dialogue and media. Hu was considered a traitor by the CPC as he did not uphold Maoist Ideology; however he was a hero to the majority of students and intellectuals who favoured democratic ideals. Many students, intellectuals and even civilians were greatly impacted as they were discomforted by the lack of respect by the Government who made subdued funeral arrangements. So in response, 200,000 students had defied a ban to carry out a demonstration of mourning for Yaobang. In addition, they had delivered a petition to the Premier of the Politburo Standing Committee, Li Peng and demanded that the Government reassess his legacy....

...TiananmenSquareTiananmenSquare is a large public square in Beijing, China. The square was named for its Gate of Heavenly Peace. It contains the monument of the heroes of the revolution, the museum of history and revolution, and the Great Hall of the People. However, in 1989, it became the opposite of heavenly peace.
Hu Yaobang served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1980 to 1987. As a reformist, he allowed students to have protests and because of this, he was forced out of office in 1987. Shortly after, he died of heart failure and the government did not arrange for him to have a funeral. When the students heard of this, they were outraged. The government then decided that they would have the funeral and hundreds of thousands of students showed up. Then, the students became even more outraged for two reasons. First, the government was still refusing their petition. Second, even though the government gave Yaobang a funeral, it wasn’t proper. This was the spark of the TiananmenSquareMassacre. After Yaobang’s funeral, China’s new general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, left to take a vacation to North Korea (eventually he becomes fired). While he was gone Li Peng took over. Some student representatives demanded to meet with Premier Li Peng, so they carried a petition to the steps of the...

...American News Coverage on
TiananmenSquareMassacre 1989
I: Introduction
Through Television news media, the whole America was watching China during April 15th to June 4th in 1989. U.S. audiences were well informed the progress of student protests when journalists used news technologies to transmit instantaneously what was happening in Beijing TiananmenSquare and other places in China. Ironically, the real-time political response was not launched firstly by Bush's Administration but the Chinese Government: American news media like CNN and CBS were ordered shutdown" by "official representatives of the Chinese Government, embarrassed and clearly aware that they were losing face on live television." After June 4th the U.S. reconsidered their bilateral relations with China on "an entirely different course, one that is far more contentious and hostile than at any time since the late 1950s". In this paper, I examine the factors that may determine the relations between American news media and the foreign policy-making process in this case by using Entman's cascade model. The main attention of my research is focused on the analysis of the dominant frame of news coverage made by the New York Times. During the analysis, the semi-influence of the news media on foreign policy decisions is explicitly displayed.
II: Rationale for Using the Cascade Model
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...Was there a massacre in TiananmenSquare?
On June 4, 1989, a large group of students gathered in TiananmenSquare to protest for their right to freedom of speech and democracy. In retaliation, the Chinese government sent martial law to control them. A riot between the troops and the protestors was broadcast across the world and called the ‘TiananmenSquareMassacre’. The Chinese government denies this to be true and calls the event the ‘TiananmenSquare Incident’. BBC footage, witness accounts and journals written about the event suggest a massacre did occur. However, official government sources, and the unreliability of witnesses and media accounts imply that the massacre of the students at TiananmenSquare did not occur.
The existence of a massacre in TiananmenSquare is demonstrated in the televised BBC reports. BBC journalists recorded footage of casualties leaving the square to over-crowded, under-staffed hospitals. BBC described the scene as “[t]he troops have been firing indiscriminately… Their own army were firing at them.” This footage suggests that there was violence in TiananmenSquare with the potential for fatalities. The BBC journalist also reports to have picked...

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...the ‘TiananmenSquareMassacre’ from the ‘Chinese Communist Party’ were driven by a need to maintain total control of China. As Michael Lynch states in the supporting quotation, they were willing to curtail the political freedoms of the public to do so. Most modern historians, including Lynch and Zhang Liang believe the immediate reactions of the C.C.P. were motivated by China’s political leaders who wanted a “violent end to the affair.” The long-term reactions from the C.C.P. were shrouded in secrecy and plagued by misinformation. These immediate and long-term reactions were justified by two core reasons; one passionate and one pragmatic. The first was a matter of revenge; Deng Xiaoping wished to punish the protestors after two months of rebellion. Pragmatically, Deng and the C.C.P., in their quest for total control, realised they had to crush their enemies and deter future threats and their reactions reflected this mentality.
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...The subjugation of the protesters provided an essential meaning to the CCP, they persevered. The rebellion was crushed, callously, despite expectations in the west that the government would collapse and a ‘serious chaotic state’ would appear, they remained. The reality that the government remained distinctly indicated an end to calls from pro-democrats to reorganise a rebellion. Gittings argues that ‘fear of national upheaval with historical memory of the rebellion within the past century remained,’ augmenting Bensons view that the ‘shadow of Tiananmen is unlikely to disappear.’ The remonstrations allowed the government to reassess the political guidance of Dengism, which had inadvertently legitimised the insurgence, as the government declared, ‘the incident taught us…we see more clearly.’ It indicated the importance of protecting economic development besides national sovereignty. The ‘arguably’ unruly conduct of the government illustrated they were seldom tolerating a political mutiny to arise. Source 5 concludes with this line of argument that the government would have done all that was necessary to suppress the protests for the sake of socio-economic and political stability. Source 11 corresponds to this point, detailing the need in stopping the protests by stating the urgency of repressing it as to ensure administrative well-being and prevent defeat of the socialist system. Furthermore, as Benson referenced, concurring with Source 11, it most importantly...

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It was a bloody massacre. On June 3rd and 4th, 1989, Chinese protestors at TiananmenSquare were gunned down by the Chinese Military. Over 100,000 protestors gathered in TiananmenSquare on May 4th, 1989 in order to protest the Communist government, the death of Hu Yaobang, as well as the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. After being warned of using force to break up the protests, Chinese soldiers and tanks entered TiananmenSquare and open fired. This bloody event killed and injured thousands, as well as bruising China's reputation in the world. The TiananmenSquareMassacre was an influential event that greatly affected China socially, economically, and politically.
It all started with the death of Hu Yaobang on April 15th, 1989. Hu Yaobang was considered the voice of the people in the Communist party. He had a much more liberal point of view, and fought corruption in the government. Yaobang had been dismissed as General Secretary of the Communist Party, as he was seen to be too Democratic, and was too soft on student protesters. After his death, people poured in the streets to grieve for their lost voice, and mourned for many days. On April 22nd, thousands of students marched on the Great Hall of People to have Li Peng sign a petition to restore Hu's besmirched legacy. When Li Peng refused,...